Bad omen

I'm in the market for a lightweight, portable keyboard for all the usual reasons someone who actually knows how to touch type might not want to deal with the frustrations of the on-screen keyboard on iOS devices. While the Mac wireless keyboard works perfectly fine, it's a lot larger and a bit heavier than I want to carry.

Imagine my happiness at finding what appeared to be a tiny, compact board with actual, pressable keys. Over the years, I've successfully worked with keyboards so small that the home row could be adequately demonstrated by simply placing your fingertips in a line, touching together. On that board, due to the extreme compact placement of keys, I had to slow down a bit, but I could achieve between 40-60 wpm, with excellent accuracy.

A well-designed small board has well-demarcated keys (often called a Chiclet keyboard, after the candy-coated chewing gum). A well-designed keyboard has keys in places that make sense--commonly used items such as punctuation shouldn't be assigned to some apparently random place.

The first clue that my newest acquisition might not be up to the task was the simple question of how much does it weigh? Carefully inspecting the package provided no enlightenment. Expecting the manual to contain this information, the store manager helped me to open the package: nope, nothing. The manager went online and managed to find a product specification sheet, not linked here because I can't find it anywhere--the website has minimal information on the product specs.

In any case, the product specs she found and gave me to me on hardcopy included all the typical information of description, reorder number, pack size, brand, system requirements, compatibility, etc. The bad omen arises when you see the answer to my question about the product weight.

This answer is a classic blunder, one that's shown up in some fairly spectacular examples. As you know, we get fabulous data about Mars regularly from the Mars Climate Orbiter. Wait--you don't remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? Maybe you remember this: it didn't get to Mars, at least, not in one piece, possibly not even in particularly tiny pieces thanks to disintegrating. Why might that happen, you wonder? A simple problem--the spacecraft operated on metric, while the ground-based software back on Earth operated in Imperial. When it comes to manouevring, this discrepancy is disastrous.

According to the keyboard specifications, the weight is 7.23 oz (3.28 kg). I don't use ounces, but I understand they're pretty light. I do, however, use kilograms and something that weighs more than three of them is pretty hefty. One kilogram is one thousand grams, and one gram is about the weight of a paperclip. Google's conversion feature shows that 7.23 oz should be nearly 205 paperclips, which feels about right.

Despite being much lighter than claimed on the specification sheet, I won't be keeping this keyboard. Again, the whole point of having a keyboard is so that a touch-typist can, well, touch-type. After giving it a thorough workout, it's clear that the problems go far beyond merely getting used to a new board. These problems are not surmountable simply by continuing to use it--fundamental design problems make the board no better than the problems that already exist using built-in iOS on-screen keyboards. Others have reviewed the downsides of this item at length, I'll just add that given the strange position of the spacebar relative to the letter keys, I have to wonder whether the designers themselves actually know how to type.